Quoting clickhappy (Reply 16):
Dan, never seen a slide lab be able to do anything other than push or pull.
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Well, they have to color balance the slide with chemistry, for one. Machines do a lot of that automatically these days, but it wasn't always the case. The kind of chemistry that they use plays a difference too, and that has some creative choices. Obviously you can't manipulate a slide in many of the ways you can manipulate a printed negative, but it's not as simple as "film goes in, slide comes out." In the end, something has to do the post processing; the slide lab is doing it for you, especially if you like Kodachome (which should be dead soon, which makes me sad). It takes a lot of skill and time to be an excellent color slide processor.
Obviously the end result of a slide is something that they can usually only adjust color or push/pull exposure. You obviously can't level or crop a slide unless you cut the film, you can't do traditional darkroom manipulation (airbrushing, unsharp masking, etc) on a slide, but you (or the lab) could have done all of that on a print of your slide.
I just think the whole "I do it all in camera" is a bit disingenuous whether it is film or digital, because there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes, either at the lab that processes your slides or prints, or your own darkroom, or via the camera's image engine, or via your RAW converter of choice. Then let's not forget what the guys in prepress would do to images that came to go on press for books or newspaper; that's a whole other ballgame that I could bore people to death on.
We really agree on, "Anyways, to each their own, as long as you are having fun that's all that matters" is 100% true.
I once heard that someone (probably Ansel Adams) said the negative was the score and the print was the performance. I'd say it's an apt analogy.
I think, in the end, an image is what you get out of it. I for one don't really care for a lot of postprocessing; I used to do professional retouching for my day job for things much more temperamental than a.net (offset printing). I use presets as much as possible and strive for automation. The most manual process I have is sharpening for a.net. It's actually more cumbersome to sharpen for small web sizes than it is for large prints as there's much less resolution to work with. When I make prints, my sharpening is nearly automated.
